


Capacitor

by Indices



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Backstory, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, Identity Issues, POV First Person, the wonders and horrors of plot armor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22433032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indices/pseuds/Indices
Summary: One who aims to rebuild God must first submit themselves to be rebuilt.
Comments: 32
Kudos: 28





	1. Resistor

**Author's Note:**

> This started as an attempt to come up with my own headcanon for how the "metal identity-thief" version of Bumaro could have:
> 
> A) Been a perfectly normal, insignificant Mekhanite before drinking God’s Ichor.
> 
> B) Somehow encountered Ion in person prior to the "final battle," to the point of developing a degree of personal familiarity.
> 
> At this point, it's safe to say that I've bitten off more than I can chew.

_Once, in a place neither far nor near, there lived a Mekhanite._

_He was one of many among the rank-and-file of his order, and had obtained nothing notable in zeal or innovation. Our Mekhanite was so humble and ordinary, in fact, that his most notable trait was that he lived at all._

_(There was a joke in that, if you cared to hear it.)_

***

Before—

Yes, there had been such a time.

I had hardly been the best of us. 

One of the earliest memories that can still be retrieved: Legate Karpathia, tall and stern in her silvered chassis, reciting the scriptures from plated scrolls to a gaggle of restless neophytes. Myself, knees on the marble floor. Wishing it was not so cold. In those days the temple had taken on foundlings not only from their own, orphans and runaways; and so I found myself there, listening with all the patience that a ten-year-old could muster.

“But why did MEKHANE give reason to _us_?” I asked, when it was finished. “Why not, uh—goats, or beetles?” There were a few giggles from around me, quickly shushed.

“Humanity had been the chosen prey of the FLESH,” she replied, with a tone of faint distaste. “We alone possessed the potential for reason, but were shackled by the Demiurge to our basest instincts; our fear and ignorance.”

I would not be punished for asking questions here. Nor coddled: curiosity was held as conducive to sound reasoning, if handled properly. But that did not mean that certain questions would not draw the priests’ ire. They tended to be either the most obvious or most convoluted. In rare cases, ones that touched on matters heretical. 

So I nodded my head, and refrained from asking about the fear and ignorance that still existed in the world (because MEKHANE remained Broken and reassembly was our charge), or why sometimes not knowing things made you less afraid (for that was the false calm of oblivion, absolute knowledge was the only _true_ cure for fear), or exactly what “potential” meant (brains, I thought). 

Understand this: I did not _disbelieve_ anything. For one such as I, who had been raised in the faith all my life, there had never been a path other than to trust in the word of the Broken One, and the intrinsic beauty of well-built machinery. 

But there was always an inkling of discomfort. A yearning, to have had a chance to arrive at all this for myself. 

Even as I grew into it over the years, even as I shed my doubts and anchored myself fully against the comforting weight of faith—there was some part of me that never stopped looking for answers, for the last and total truth that was the promise of our God. 

***

_Why had our Mekhanite lived, when so many worthier had passed away? He wondered this often himself. He had started wondering once upon a time, and never quite stopped._

_And on those very longest nights when all his congregation had departed, and the stars were the only things visible that surpassed him in age (though most of them were long-dead, too), he wondered if he would have chosen this._

_But in every way that mattered, he had. Hadn’t he?_

***

I had hardly been the best of us. 

That would be Nikostratos. To say nothing of accomplishment. Of course, drafting designs early was no rarity. Plenty tried their hand and failed. But his prototypes, when built and tested, were actually functional. More than merely functional—they worked with astounding efficacy. Of the acolytes around our age he was without peer.

Needless to say, he had achieved the rank of Inventor-Faithful with breakneck speed, and there was already talk of sending him to the frontiers of our territory.

At one point I almost envied him. It was by the flaws of our organics that humans could not be equal in competence, but the thought gave no comfort. Although it was the same temple, we had been taught and housed in a different wing; I had only heard of him before. But the day came that they sent me to deliver a commission to his workshop. 

The great prodigy Nikostratos turned out to be scrawnier than I’d imagined, and less mechanized: only his hands and forearms had been replaced. 

And—his eyes? 

“I was born blind,” he explained, with a lopsided grin. His teeth were slightly crooked. “You hadn’t heard? Anyhow, marvelous to meet you!"

He raised a hand in greeting.

"Please, call me Nikos. I receive a great deal of visitors, but they always seem to want me to _do_ something. Unless…”

I handed him the commission. 

And then, against all logic, the question slipped out.

“Do they... help? The optics?”

Nikostratos—“Nikos,” by his request—had been unrolling the message in a flurry of motion. At the question, he froze. A strange expression came over his face.

“The workings of the organic eye, I’ve found, are too intricate for even our current methods to replicate! Can you imagine?” Even so, he sounded more eager than disappointed. “But I’ve learned to adapt.” 

So saying, he ran a hand over a prototype lying on the desk nearby—something that looked like a scope with multiple lenses—and pressed a button that made it unfold. “One can do a great deal with simple memorization and pressure-sensitivity.” 

All at once, he adopted a conspiratorial tone.

“Think you can keep a secret?”

I was unsure how to respond. How could he trust me, when we had barely met? “That depends. Is it serious?”

“No, no. Just a small, ah, joke. Since you cared enough to ask. You see,” he gave a little chuckle. “I don’t actually mind not being able to see. These?” He tapped on the optics. “Mostly for show. They want to see that I’m improving myself. But MEKHANE knows that I’ve done so in the ways that really matter.”

This was ammunition. A jolt went through me, as though he had just passed bottled fire into my hands. 

I might have left, then, might have reported him for heresy, seen the prodigy unseated—

But there would be no satisfaction in it. I thought of Legate Karpathia, her glares of warning, the stunted questions of my childhood, the way people whispered in the hallways: _he’ll never come to anything, that one, much too prone to inquiry and not the precise kind either, you see how doubt corrodes at the circuitry of faith_... _?_

“I see,” I said simply. And did not leave.

“Oh, do you?” His eyebrows sailed upwards, into a tangled mass of curls. “My suspicions are confirmed.”

For a moment, we could only stare at each other.

Then—uneasily at first, and then louder, nonsensically so—we started to laugh.

***

_There was a list of questions that our Mekhanite kept in the back of his head._

_(As well as on the hard drives of numerous computer systems, including several electronic tablets and at least one USB flash drive; a variety of bronze-bound scrolls; and a single, weathered sheet of papyrus that by now was far too frail to be written on.)_

_He had been adding to it for a very long time. It was the list of questions that he intended to beg answer from MEKHANE, should he live to see his God rebuilt._

_The list started with: “Why?”_

_(Followed shortly by: “Why me?”)_

***

In my nineteenth year the mutterings started. 

An empire to the north. 

It was not new; had in fact been growing for centuries, now. But I gathered that, for most of that time, the prevailing view was that we could not yet drive every blight from the Earth. Least of all ones that afflicted only barbarians, so far from our base of power. It had not gone uncontested. After all, were not all people of equal worth in the eyes of MEKHANE? And was it not better to excise a tumor before it could grow? But the objections had yielded nothing.

This was different. Whispers accumulated in the temple corridors. That it was an empire of the FLESH, ruled by a Daevite slave who had taken into him the power of the Demiurge. That it showed no signs of stopping, and of course could not be permitted _not_ to stop, for that would mean the end of the world in every way that counted. 

That it was encroaching, far too close.

And so the mutterings turned into lengthy debates, and then into proclamations, and on one sun-drenched morning we found ourselves marching off to war. Nikostratos and I were assigned to a contingent led by Karpathia, and promptly dispatched to Cyprus, where they were making their latest incursions. 

Deathless. That was what they called themselves. I had not fully understood this until then. 

Of course, the powers of fleshcrafting had already been described to me, sometimes in great detail. I’d even seen the remains of scouts unfortunate enough to be spotted. And our contingent had armaments of our own: Colossi and holy fire, incendiary munitions, long-range weaponry that would fling a chain of lightning twenty feet ahead. But none of it prepared me for the field of battle.

The karcists and their puppets— _halkosts_ , they called them—were not so many in number. But they seemed almost indistinct from each other, separating and recombining with sickening frequency. One would vaporize a beast, only to realize that it had only been one part of a greater body. Any flesh that had not been utterly carbonized, burned to ashes or charred to a cinder, could still be used. Mere dismemberment was next to useless, and Karpathia had warned us to avoid close-combat if at all possible. It made it harder to aim.

(“Little doubter,” she still called me, but without the slicing tone that her voice took on when subordinates disobeyed her directives. It fell on the gradient between flattering and terrifying, if such a thing existed, that my old instructor had remembered me after all this time.)

Nevertheless, the tide seemed to turn. For a moment they seemed almost beaten. We had risen from the blood and muck with the notion that we could win, that perhaps we could really do it—

And there, striding into the swathe we had cut into their forces: a girl.

She looked barely thirteen. A scrap of a thing, wearing plain leathers and draped with an ill-fitting cloak. That was leather, too, tattered and overlarge—no, not leather— _scaled_. Snakeskin? It fluttered away. 

And then I saw.

There were snakes twining in her hair, braided and woven, drawing curlicues ceaselessly through the air. The same was in her arms. And the word was truly _in_ , not _on_ , for their tails seemed to wind from somewhere under the skin. But most of all, what drew my eye was the shadow that she cast, stretched long in the setting sun. There was nothing of the girl in it, only something oily-black and sinuous that blurred when it shifted: now serpent, now human, now one and the same.

Karpathia turned to face her. The Legate-Faithful’s chassis, gore-crusted, was no longer gleaming. She must have detested that. 

(A part of me wanted to call out, to warn her, to do anything. But even then, she must have known what she was facing.)

“Where is your master?” Karpathia’s voice was flat and scything. It carried well. Rang off the distant cliffs, like mallets on sheet-metal, a challenge as bold and doomed as Mitanni's for old Assyria. I felt an irrational surge of pride for my former teacher. “If he is on this island, then run back and tell him that we intend no surrender— _ever_. No matter what new manner of abomination he should choose to throw at us.”

From the Klavigar: a low hiss, like scorn or laughter. 

“He is no such thing to me. And now you shall have your wish.”

Karpathia hefted her polearm. They were still at a distance from each other, but her munitions were almost depleted. Even had she any to spare—the Klavigar seemed to _glide_ across the ground, one with her shadow, faster than the eye could track. Faster than any of us could interfere. In a blink, she was already there.

Her weapons were mere daggers, hewn from bone. Even for a Legate, Karpathia was heavily-augmented. Only sections of her head and neck had yet to be replaced. But her helmet had been knocked away by an earlier explosion.

She swung: a wide, sweeping arc. Missed. The Klavigar sprang forward, leaping up in a motion that seemed to blur—and struck a glancing blow off the side of her face.

I held my breath. The battlefield sun glowered down on the scene, and glinted from her cheek. It had drawn blood. 

With brisk efficiency, Karpathia pressed a hand to the wound, and with the other reached for something strapped to her belt—

(beneath the fingers at her face, something stirred)

—and detonated.

***

As I crawled my way through the billowing smoke, all around lay the bits and pieces of scrap-metal that had once composed my teacher. An arm landed behind me. A leg, to my right. And before me...

The Klavigar staggered. Her upper body was a red ruin. The whole of her head was gone, and most of the torso, along with the arms. 

But it was repairing even as I stared. I could do only that, rooted in place, as the body began to stitch itself together from the point where it was blasted apart, first the heart and lungs and bone, then the veins; flesh and skin knitting back into the shape that they had been. Until she stood, just as before. A girl and her shadow. No more and no less.

She walked off. For a time afterwards, I felt the impression of sliver-pupils lingering through the haze, pair by pair, as though weighing the cost of survivors.

(I would leave that battlefield alive. But its memory did not leave me, no matter how many would come after.)


	2. Transducer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Mekhanite finds himself the beneficiary of a series of seemingly impossible accidents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: slight gore, implied suicidal ideation

You would not think this if you saw me now, but I was afraid, then. 

Sometimes I can scarcely believe it myself. I do not say this in hubris. What I have become was a necessity, for the sake of this world and our God, but a mind without fear is no point of pride for me.

(Nor one of shame, to know emotion. Only a module that has grown remote.)

Nikos had lost both of his legs, and although he replaced them quickly, with the cheeriness of before, the manic energy that had animated him seemed to ebb somewhat. He threw himself into his work after that—as much out of distraction as necessity, for we were ordered off to new battles almost as soon as the dust had settled.

We survived many of those battles, together. Some fought to victory, some to defeat. Some to bleakest stalemate. For several years the war hung in limbo, neither side gaining the upper hand. Our allies sent reinforcements, from Canaan and Assyria, and Egypt to the south—but the territories of the deathless ones were vast, and held resources of their own.

Nor is this a point of pride:

After all this time, the centuries piled on centuries, I remember most clearly the ones that brought me face-to-face with _him._

Perhaps it was the shock. We all heard the stories—of how their Sorcerer-King would take to the field of battle, alone or astride the hulking Klavigar of War, armed with his staff of bone and a seething mass of unbound flesh.

When he descended on the scene, even from afar, one could sense it. Their forces fought with renewed vigor, as though bolstered by his very presence. And something about the air would change. As though it had thickened, heavy with the scent of blood and other, darker things. Like the doom that was to befall us. 

Stories were stories. After repeated skirmishes across several islands, the odd glimpse was inevitable. But I had not expected to come any closer, and live.

It happened, for the first time, on the Macedonian coast. We were faring badly. The commander had called for a retreat, and I found myself half-carrying an unconscious Nikos as we stumbled in a vague approximation of the correct direction. Most of our forces had already gone—or lay on the ground, in disassembly. 

I muttered a quiet prayer to MEKHANE as we passed them by. There was no time to pause. 

Meanwhile, the earth shook violently as the Klavigar, Orok (we had learned their names by now, for all the good it did us) managed to fling a Colossus backwards from the other side of the battlefield. Momentarily distracted, I did not notice someone nearby alighting down on silent, leathery wings.

“How valiant,” they murmured. In the cacophony it was barely audible—but something about the voice made me glance over.

It was—

A man.

Dark-haired and dark-eyed. Perhaps more young than old. But oddly ageless above it all, with an expression about the eyes that might have seemed sympathetic if it was not so detached.

Still, he might have been perfectly ordinary. 

If not for the cloak, fluttering in the wind like some grisly battle-standard. 

If not for his armor: seamless layers that extended from the body, more intricate than that of any Sarkic soldier I had seen. 

If not for the bat-wings folded in place of his arms, and the four _other_ arms that held the staff, a great spiraling thing draped with tissue and streamers of offal.

You would not think this if you saw me now. Knowing what I know now. 

But I was afraid, then. I remember that, though I do not remember what it felt like. Only that I _did_ feel it. It may have begun as a quickening beat of the heart, or a sensation like the stomach dropping away, or a cold that started at the fingertips and crept gradually inward, until the knees buckled and the mind dispersed in all directions. 

It might have been any of those. But it was _something_.

Well. 

That is slightly inaccurate. My knees could not have buckled. They were frozen in place.

As was the whole of my body: I stood transfixed, weaponless, staring back with a blankness that could not even be charitably interpreted as defiance. 

He was not in my mind. He did not have to be. _MEKHANE save me,_ was the prayer circling there desperately. _Please, my God, grant me the insight to escape this. Or, barring that, the discipline to face my death with calm._ Another part of me insisted that this was my chance, to finally prove myself worthy of Her grace, to fling myself bodily forward and offer up this flawed form for a chance—however slim—at injuring him. 

Ion of Adytum, Sorcerer-King of the FLESH and haunt of a thousand nightmares, looked off to the side. Then back at us. 

“Out of regard for your… comradely loyalty.” He spoke softly, in accented Greek, with the tone of someone talking to a pet for amusement. Or perhaps an insect. “I shall make this quick.”

A hand began to rise. I prepared myself to fling Nikos behind me as far as possible—if only I could will my accursed organics to _move_.

The ground shuddered, closer to us. 

And then—

Something massive toppled over in front of us, not three feet from where I stood. Another of the Colossi. The crash shook me out of my stupor, and I scrambled away, resuming our retreat with Nikos slung awkwardly about my shoulders. 

As I did so, I thought I could catch strains of conversation from beyond the obstruction. First, a deep rumble. That must have been Orok. Though he spoke in the language of their twisted city, it sounded like a question. I caught the words " _Ozi̮rmok"_ and " _tsaŋa_." The response was brief, but without heat. _To reassure?_ I filed that away to process later.

Something that sounded like " _tsatsa."_ And the ground began to shake again.

I kept fleeing. Faster, this time.

***

Afterwards, Nikos made me recount it all to him, and lamented bitterly that he had not been awake. 

“You couldn’t have done anything,” I told him. “Our munitions were depleted. And I discarded my spear.”

“Eh?” The metal parts of his optics rearranged themselves in rapid succession, as if to blink. “And _why_ would you do something like that?” 

“To carry _you_.” 

“Ah. Right.” Nikos looked vaguely shamefaced, turning back to stoke the fire. One of his last designs before this campaign had been an ignition-device that would kindle flame without being on fire itself. Due to its small size, it had not been adaptable for combat, and so was ordered scrapped. “Sorry.”

I tried to sound reassuring. “Don’t dwell on it. I doubt a single spear would have been effective, at that time.”

“But just _imagine_ it. With the right amount of firepower, you might have ended the war right then and there.” He faced the campfire and smiled to himself, ever-so-slightly. “For all of this to be over… it’s a beautiful dream. But impossible, of course. Quite impossible.”

“Have some faith. We’ll get him next time.” 

I said this completely in jest. Not that I didn’t _want_ to—but there was a difference between wanting and believing you could.

Nevertheless, it produced the intended response. Nikos gave a startled bark of laughter. But as our shift ended and we were called to retire, I could tell that his eyes were far away. 

***

That encounter alone would have been enough. 

But for some reason, it kept happening. 

That is to say: the same general sequence of events would play out, again and again, in different settings. We would be deployed to some battlefield. I went to the frontlines, while Nikos was more often kept in the rear. The battle would begin. 

And then, I would come face-to-face with _him._

Only to survive. Somehow, against all reason, I would _survive_. 

(Perhaps the shock of that does not register properly. I will provide an analogy.

In the 21st century, there exists a hypothetical [ device ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster) designed by one Julijonas Urbonas. It is known as the “Euthanasia Coaster.” Intended to emulate the titular amusement park ride, it contains a 500-meter drop followed by seven interlocking clothoid inversions of decreasing diameter—with one notable deviation. By the end, the sustained gravitational force equivalent generated through its motions should have succeeded in killing every last one of the passengers. 

Every part of it would be precisely calibrated to accomplish that goal of death. Successive operations would act as insurance that passengers did not, in fact, survive.

Now, imagine if one were to take this ride, and survive. And be loaded on again, fully expecting to die. And survive. 

A third time. 

A fourth.

Do you understand, now?)

It happened on Peparethos, as Ion chose once more to appear in person. My contingent should have been the first to face his wrath. Most were dragged away or torn apart bodily by the beasts that he set on us—and, just beyond them, I could see the silhouette of that same figure. The tattered cloak, the staff upraised. The bland smile.

But I found myself knocked into a crevice, unconscious until the battle was over. I awoke buried beneath bodies.

Never had victory tasted so like chalk, a dryness in my throat. I imagined another tally against me. _Coward, doubter, faithless_. _Faithless._ Scornful stares in the barracks, whispers meant to be heard. As if I’d _wanted_ to—

Utterly illogical, of course. None of us could afford that kind of pettiness. Least of all now. Still, the shame ate at me, like the creeping rot of iron oxide.

Nor was it long-lived. I was present when they swept over the south of Euboea, like the tide coming in. They were advancing by the island. For a while it appeared as if we had pushed them back in the east. Now, we could only retreat southward. 

And again. On Andros, whose fortifications preceded even our own. On Tinos, haunt of snakes, and Delos the would-be-sacred. Each time, I remained one of thousands, engulfed in the chaos that swirled across the battlefield—yet felt completely alone. As though all of reality had contracted to a pinpoint. The garroting eye of a needle. 

And the thread— 

At the end of that tunnel was always him. 

That same panoply of war, arrayed in terrible intricacy. The jarringly ordinary profile. Each time, on the verge of brushing me aside, as one might swat a fly. 

But then, something else would draw his attention. A need for orders, an attack from someone bolder… and so on. Until he seemed to _recognize_ me. Until he no longer tried to attack, only stopped for a second; stood still in the midst of battle and stared directly at me, with an odd expression on his face. On anyone else, I might have deemed it perplexion. On the Sorcerer-King of the FLESH, the direst threat that we had faced and perhaps would face for all eternity—I did not know what to make of it.

Meanwhile, impossibly, life went on. I experienced considerable paranoia that my superiors would suspect some form of connection between myself and the Sarkic forces, expecting at any moment to be called away from my post for a formal investigation. But none came. 

Nor did I dare to imagine that this was MEKHANE’s divine intervention. Not when others fell in droves around me. That would have been the height of arrogance, for one such as myself. 

Our old captain had been slain on Peparethos. Nikos, as the next in rank, had succeeded him. He bore the mantle uneasily, with a nervous jittering laugh that soon became brittle; sharp-edged. 

If he had thrown himself into his work before, he was now divided fully between that and strategy. Never sleeping. The weapons he built grew increasingly complex, and unpredictably deadly. Likewise his tactics. Where before he would have leapt at the prospect of rattling on for hours about some abstruse theorem; now, if any of his lieutenants questioned his methods, he would not hesitate to snap at them. Myself included.

One day, I awoke to find him having augmented his upper arms, without ceremony. The next, his torso. Several nights later I stumbled onto him, hunched over his work table with half of his skull sawed open, the bone there neatly removed. In one hand was a bloodied lancet. In the other, something hard and gleaming. A metal plate.

“Just a bit of last-minute insurance,” he said briskly, smiling over at me. 

But it seemed that the smile was a little too wide, too lopsided. Too _uncontrolled_ , even for him. A bit of blood dripped onto his teeth. 

He licked it away and returned to work, as if I wasn’t there at all.

***

Finally, when the sun rose over Mykonos on the day before our battle there, Nikos told me of his plan.

“You’ve encountered him again, haven’t you,” he asked. “The Grand Karcist.”

I nodded, unsure of where he was taking this. “As we’ve discussed. An uncanny number of times.”

Nikos’ face lit up, briefly, as it used to. 

“I have a theory on why that might be,” he began, slowly. “Suppose that… the Broken One really has shown you favor. Suppose this is a tool we could use. Not the _only_ possibility, but one possible option. To end the war. Suppose that the true test was only that we could see it for what it really was.” 

And then: 

“I’ve constructed a device.”

He explained it to me. 

In many ways, it was similar to other incendiary devices that we had deployed. But there were several key differences. First, it would detonate only on contact with organic material in conjunction with the activation of a remote switch. Secondly, at the moment of detonation, it would simultaneously create a spherical forcefield that extended five feet in diameter around itself, sealing off whomever was enveloped, as well as the the explosion itself, from anyone else in the vicinity. 

And third—its explosive power was, according to him, many hundreds of times greater than any of the previous weapons in use. For this reason, it could only be detonated once.

When he was finished, I gave him a disbelieving look. 

“And you intend to use this on…” I trailed off. “Assuming that your theory is even worth entertaining, should we not report it to the higher offices?”

Nikos shook his head. “No time, my friend. The battle is tomorrow, and who knows when you’ll have outlasted MEKHANE’s favor?”

There was a moment of quiet.

“We were refugees, you know,” he began again, unprompted. “My aunt and I. Do you remember? They tried to treat her, at the temple—but her injuries were too grave. I never told you, but this was what we were fleeing, then.” 

He peered at me, unusually solemn. In the morning light, his face looked wan; there were dark shadows in the spaces beneath the optics. 

“And what else _could_ we do?” A note of hysteria, with the rising inflection. A crack in his voice. One who did not know him might have suspected theater; I did not. “They’d taken everyone back home—more flesh for the halkost. Death would have been a _mercy_.

“So I ask this of you, my friend—please. Think of every battlefield you’ve set foot on for years. It would be like that the world over. You _know_ that. And you have to know that this is our only real chance to end it here, now. While we still can. Before they advance any further.”

I would have told him that his plan was mad, that _he_ was mad—except that I could imagine that world, too. As though it was already here: the boneyard forests, the bruise-colored skies, the seas of blood and pus. People transformed into grotesque caricatures of themselves, with neither foresight nor inhibition, more fully in the grasp of the FLESH than the all the heights of human impulse could take them. I thought of a young Nikos, his eyes glazed over with horror. A family subsumed.

Wanton violence, unthinking cruelty. Action without reason. A miasma of disorder, choking the world.

All hope to rebuild our God, lost forever.

And if this was truly our only chance—if this was what it took, would it not be suitable? For me to finally render up this flawed form in the service of MEKHANE? 

(A part of me already felt as though I’d outlived any lifespan I had a right to.)

“Very well,” I said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Adytite in this comes from [Ämärangnä Language (Adytite)](http://www.scp-wiki.net/old-adytite-language). Unfortunately, I'm kind of an idiot and couldn't figure out who the author was (their account seems to have been deleted). 
> 
> Using this source, "tsaŋa" is Old Adytite for "to hit," and "tsatsa" means "to walk, step, go."


	3. Actuator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Mekhanite sees schemes come to predictable ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: reference to disordered eating

To any observers it would have seemed laughable. Were we truly about to bait the anathema, the god-eater himself? Only the two of us, unaided and unapproved? Least of all by the priesthood?

(But we were young and had all the drive of zeal untempered by caution. Even now, with the knowledge of three millennia and the unthinkable humming in my blood, I would not consider such a thing without first consulting with my congregation. 

Perhaps it had come with the position. The realization of how much hinges on each and every one of my actions, down to the microgram.) 

Plainly it was folly. The worst of folly. 

For anyone, it would have been folly.

Nikos gave me the device, and we waited.

“We will still be at our usual positions at the start.” He would gesture accordingly at a map or chart depicting our formations. “When you see him at an isolated place, signal me.” It would have to be a sound out of the human range of hearing, that could travel relatively long distances. How convenient that he had just the device. “Then—just try and distract him.”

He would be holding the detonator. When I asked why I could not, his face was unreadable. “Too close to the target,” he said. “If you were incapacitated, nothing could be done.” I could not help but think it was distrust. 

Either he doubted my competence, or he must have believed I would give up my life too easily. The irony. That I was not only to act as bait, but mistrusted with my own life—as if I couldn’t judge accurately when it would be worth the sacrifice. (Of course, this would be whenever it could plausibly slay what we meant it to. I was skeptical that the opportunity would even present itself.) 

But no. The choice to sacrifice me would be his. 

All the while I wondered if this would be the day that the strange occurrences ended. That whatever force drew me repeatedly into the maw of the anathema, then pulled me away just before they snapped shut, would simply—cease. 

When I brought this up with Nikos, it seemed he was only capable of saying meaningless, reassuring things. “I trust observed experiences. After all those times, would another be so unusual? If we fail—there would be no great loss. But just think of the _magnitude_ of what we could accomplish.”

What I did not say was that it was precisely this magnitude that concerned me. Ion of Adytum had already lived for centuries, and while I did not believe that his thaumaturgy granted any preternatural intelligence, it was only logical that one would need a great deal of cunning to do what he had done. 

So it seemed to me that I did not need reassurance. What I needed, more than anything, was a little faith.

***

The day of battle dawned like any other. As the sun crested over the fields that sloped almost imperceptibly into shoreline, it blazed swathes of pale fire over the silhouettes of shrubbery. Our encampments were on the edge of one such field; we had received word that they would arrive by sea to land on this very shore.

As we stood among the tents, Nikos placed one hand on my shoulder. “You understand why I’m doing this, yes? You know I have no taste for glory.”

“For this to be over,” I repeated, testing the weight of his device on my sling of munitions.

On looking up I was stricken by the gauntness of his face. If we made it out of this, I thought, I would tell him to eat something. Without complete mechanization, the activity was as necessary as anything else, but some among the priesthood had a distaste for it that verged on the self-destructive. 

Nikos never had. He merely forgot. Lately, with increasing frequency.

“Precisely,” he said, with a relish that I had forgotten his voice could take on. “My friend, do you know—I imagine you must look like a machine, in this light. Perfectly calibrated.” He tapped lightly on my helmet: a _clink_ of metal fingers. “Would that I could see it!”

It was a compliment. Possibly the highest one there was, from him. 

His optics glittered. ( _Like tears_ , I thought suddenly. Senselessly.) He faced me a second longer, and went to rally the troops.

I followed, as I did.

***

It went, for the most part, as battles went. Ion himself did not show in the vanguard, and for a while I suspected he might not come at all.

But he did. 

Like the inexorable tide rolling in, he rose up on the strand, and death followed close behind. We had chosen an unpopulated place to intercept, so as to deprive him of all possible sources of material. Nevertheless it seemed as if we had diverted too little of our forces to a village some distance along the coast. He had been busy. 

Still, he drifted at the rear of their force, and even after his arrival I was nowhere close to him. For fighting uphill, they did much better than they should have. Their forces were bolstered by the hulking pale things that came from the ship bearing Ion, and for a while more I was distracted by the immediacy of combat. 

At the time I was acutely aware of it all. Looking back… it blurs.

The next vivid memory is this: we were being pushed back towards the ridgeline, and through the chaos of bodies and bombardment, I could just barely see him glide over a large outcropping. Few combatants had reached that point, from either side.

Strangely, I did not think of the plan at all, only that we had to keep them from taking the ridgeline. I thought to call for reinforcements, but my voice was lost in the din of battle. I reached for something to send a signal—and felt the sonic device that Nikos had given me.

The plan. I turned it over in my hands; it was such a small thing. Would it carry? 

I activated it. 

Then, I headed in the direction of the outcropping.

***

The scene I came upon was oddly mundane. 

“Well,” Ion said, landing lightly on the ground, “you’ve become a familiar face. And I expect your friend will be on his way, soon.” 

Had he detected the signal? My mind whirred. I was coming to the conclusion that the most logical method would be to rush forward and have Nikos detonate the explosive as soon as he was in sight. (Had there ever really been another choice?) But of course, it could not be so easy. I wouldn’t be anywhere near as fast, and that which stood before me could _fly_.

(Had the situation not been what it was, it might have stirred the old question of why I was still alive.)

It was never hard to tell where he was on the battlefield, for one could see the flesh-halo that undulated around him in all directions, slowly rotating. At its widest it stretched at least as far as a man was tall, and anyone who ventured too close risked absorption. But for some reason it seemed dormant, now.

Distractions. All our strategizing was for naught; my mind a flat wash of grey. Inanely the thought came into my mind—

“Kill me if you wish,” I began, not feeling quite real. “But—why _now_? Why here?”

Whether or not it worked, I would never find out. Just then Nikos made it to the other side of the outcropping. As he did Ion turned. And then, incredibly— 

He _smiled_.

“We meet at last. The inventor from Gyaros.”

(For that was where the both of us had been raised. Did I not mention the name? Perhaps it didn’t register as relevant. 

Or perhaps it is that, even after millennia, one can hardly stop hearing about it. One becomes... weary, after a time.)

And although we had finally come face-to-face with the abomination himself, I remember only that there was a terrible mask-like calm to Nikos’s face, then. A sort of marble stillness. Like the surface of a frozen lake in midwinter. He was bleeding from one shoulder, and there were a pair of bulky munitions strapped to his belt, on both sides, that I had never seen before.

“Do you know,” said the Sorcerer-King, his inflection like an actor's, like this had all somehow been staged, “what we did to that place?” 

We did. Of course we did. News traveled slowly, but not so slowly that such a thing would not make it to us, after so many months.

Nikos grinned, a chalkwork of white. It was horrible to look at.

“Your own soldiers. One must admire the _efficiency_ of it.”

“They gave themselves willingly.” 

Afterwards I wondered if it was the slight emphasis on _they_ that made him act at precisely that moment. Because his face did not change at all when he moved. 

In the length of a blink he had propelled across the distance, in one hand the bronze disc of the detonator, and in the other—a duplicate of the bomb I was carrying. 

It made no difference. But this time, I did say it. 

_No._

***

The forcefield threw me back. It had formed imperfectly; the explosion glanced the outcropping and it was crumbling, collapsing off the other side of the ridgeline towards the still-battling armies. We had possibly been there minutes. It felt like an eternity ago.

Foolishly, I picked myself up and staggered back. There was a circular indent in the ground where the two of them had been. In the middle of that indent was a blackened clump, and several pieces of metal. 

From behind me someone coughed slightly. 

“Disappointing.” 

(Only later would I think to wonder why one would say this, if the intention was to kill.)

All my mind felt like that white chalkwork as I turned and—he had caught the full blast of it, too, but it was as if he hadn’t at all, only the rich nauseating smell of cooking meat and faint scorch-marks gave the slightest indication—

I did something senseless, then. Something that should have killed me, and if it did not I was thinking that I may as well have dreamed all this, that my life may as well have been nothing but one long jest. I have no explanation for it, except to say that I was not the same as I am now.

No, not the same at all.

I lunged. 

***

As I said, senseless. 

It did not kill me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be combined with the next chapter, but I decided they were distinct enough that I should separate them so it wouldn't drag. 
> 
> As a hint, I think the next one could pretty much be titled "Bumaro's Bizarre Adventure" or "Bumaro and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Field Trip."


	4. Transistor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Mekhanite undergoes assorted trials.

I awoke, somewhere far away. 

(Though of course I did not know that, then.)

My dreams had all been of falling, and when I regained awareness I was lying on my side in a place that was dark and indistinct. Closer in my vision were two horizontal lines, darker than the scene beyond, which stretched across my sight from side to side. It took an unconscionably long time for me to realize what they were.

The bars of a cage.

I flung myself up. 

The motion had been too violent. An unthinking jolt of panic, instinct and adrenaline. My head slammed against the top of the cage. 

When I recovered I saw that it had been placed against the wall of a circular room, of indeterminate height, surrounded on two sides by objects that seemed too large for the cramped space. The same shapes ringed the rest of the room, broken only by an entrance opposite the cage, beyond which only darkness was visible. 

_Amphorae_ , was my first thought. Though never had I seen amphorae of this size. Nor this degree of irregularity. They were vaguely ovoid protrusions, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I could see that they were veined. Even the smallest of them dwarfed my cage. Somehow they had been grafted to the room, stacked together like many beads spun along the walls. 

If I stared too long at one I thought I could see movement. From within. And the air—the air smelled, I thought, the way it did after a nosebleed.

The floor beneath me felt leathery. I jerked my hand away. 

(Once, before this latest war, our temple was to oversee the construction of _tholoi_ for a ruler to the far southwest. A few acolytes had been dispatched, and I remember how it had felt from the inside, like a sealed hive, the heat pressing down like a cacophony of wings. I had wondered, then, why it was that the _wanax_ had commissioned this. Why even kings would wish to be interred in the manner of bees. 

But we had not been commissioned to ask questions.)

Movement, from the entrance. 

Draped in dark robes: a hunched figure. It moved strangely, a sort of shuffling glide across the floor, and there was something odd in the way its neck bent forward. Something heavy was being dragged forth.

Now it stood still in the center of the room. As I watched, it heaved forward the thing it had been dragging.

A body. 

The figure muttered something guttural; words I did not understand, in a language that sounded familiar. 

The body warped… and separated. 

First the skin, sieving off in one direction until it collected into a clump, suspended in midair. The figure made a gesture, as if directing it, and it drifted to one of the shapes to the right of the cage, melded into it with a visceral squelch. Then, they did the same with the muscle, fat, bone, and organs, directing each to another of the shapes. 

When it was done, only a miniscule portion of the body remained.

The figure retrieved this, and moved closer to my cage. Was the same to befall me? 

I felt oddly empty at the thought. 

Between the bars, the face of an elderly woman swung into view. From this distance I could see that attached to the back of her neck was another neck, and attached to that was another head. She deposited the clump of flesh between the bars.

“Eat.”

Then she turned around and retreated, moving back towards the entrance with that same shuffling motion. 

***

I did not eat.

The bars of the cage were bone; they sprouted from the leathery material of the ground and joined into one hard plate at the top. They did not break under my hands. Nor when I kicked at them. If it had not been for one thing, I might have given up at that moment. 

But as I kicked, I saw something. At the base of a length of bone, where the layer of flesh that covered the ground had been slightly scuffed—

A glint of metal. 

I fell on the spot then, tearing with my bare hands, and succeeded in prying away a little more. Underneath the unnatural growth was the smallest patch of purest bronze. Perfectly flat. Almost as though it had made up the original flooring, before—

It came to me, then. What this place was. 

It was a project that had been in progress for centuries. Had grown larger than the people who lived there. In our youth we had all heard the stories, and there were some who said, privately, that it could never be finished. But it had been our pride all the same, from island to island. That we could hope to bring some measure of Her grace even to the untrammeled air. 

I remembered the messenger who had arrived asking tithe of our temple; remembered standing on my tiptoes for a glimpse of the sacred blueprints. When it was finished, Karpathia had said, it would be deterrent enough for the heathens from the north. 

Kythera-above-the-water.

Kythera the damned.

Not in a hundred years would I have thought to lay eyes on the fortress-city—and after what had happened, never. Yet here I was. In some compartment near the defiled heart of this masterwork, having lived when I should have died, while the one who ought to have lived… 

I could not think. I did not allow it. Instead I thought of my armor. They had taken my armor; left only the tunic beneath and the sandals strapped to my feet. But there was something else, between my foot and the sandal.

Slowly, with unsteady hands, I undid the straps that stretched up my shins. They fell away. When I took hold of the sandal, the thing that fell out also glinted.

In truth, it resembled a whistle more than anything. The signal-device. 

Had I hidden it there myself? Surely I would have remembered it, had I stored it there during the battle. 

(It was not Her way, to intervene. That duty had always been ours. In attempting to perfect ourselves we could only approach Her image; in the rebuilding it would be made manifest.)

Far more likely that this was some sort of trap. Though I knew not the sense in deceiving someone who had already been trapped in every sense of the word. I could scarcely even begin to guess at their intentions in keeping me here, instead of killing me.

For days I wrestled with this, slumped in the increasingly filthy cage with hunger gnawing, wondering what use (if any) the device could be and whether that use would be in my favor or otherwise. I say days, for the karcist—I supposed the woman was a karcist—would come at regular intervals, perform the same ritual, and deposit more scraps of meat before my cage. I assumed these intervals to be daily. 

Finally, when enough of them had passed that the stench (and hunger, for I am being truthful; out of all the sensations I do not miss this may be first among them) had grown unbearable, I turned the device over in my hands. _Perfectly calibrated_ , I could almost hear somebody saying. _Machines do not give up, my friend. Not unless they are broken._ _That is why we love them, after all._

_But I am broken_ , I wanted to say, and perhaps I did say it aloud. _We all are._

Possibly I was going mad, for when I spun around no one was there. But then I thought that _he_ did not give himself up for me to let myself rot away here. Even if it was nothing, even if it had been planted—I whispered a prayer to MEKHANE. 

And then, feeling foolish, I blew it.

I could hear nothing, of course. For a few seconds nothing happened, and the thought crossed my mind that this might have been a fluke, that the only torment they had planned in planting this was the honey of false hope.

The sac to the left of my cage twitched. More forcefully than usual. 

Them the one to the right.

And then all of them were moving, as though with the force of something squirming inside. The room almost seemed to be shaking. Pinned between two of them, my cage was jostled, and I could hear a wet tearing close to my ear, like a man being torn limb from limb, as the left one _burst_.

With a roar, something tore its way from the membrane. I pressed myself to the bars on the other side, just in time for the one on the right to do the same. It might have been one of the pale, mouth-faced things I had seen in our last battle. It had more limbs, though, and in their wild thrashing one of them crashed against the bars of my cage.

It did not break. But the bar cracked, just a little. And with the next blow the crack widened. 

_Please_ , I thought. I was not thinking of how I would find my way out of this place, or how, in the fortress beyond, I was ever to escape. But, for the chance to see the sun one last time, I thought ignobly—I would not even mind if they brought me back—

Just then the karcist burst in through the door. 

My heart skipped a beat. 

I had misjudged the time. Or perhaps more had been alerted, and she was only the first to arrive.

She snapped something in that strange language; made a wide and sweeping gesture with her arm. Her gaze did not fall on me. But I knew it was only a matter of time before she subdued the host of misshapen things now emerging along the walls. As more of them spilled into the room’s center, they obscured her from my vision. 

I kicked at the cracked length of bone: once, twice. 

On the third time it gave, and I ducked headfirst towards the small space created. Where the bone had broken it left jagged ends; they scraped my arms as I passed through. 

Then I was out, in the midst of the chaos. All around me were the constructs, crashing around the room in violent, random movements. Sometimes toppling into each other. They seemed enraged. The old woman had flung off her cloak, beneath it there were a host of longer limbs, without the joints of arms or legs, as thick as the trunks of saplings. 

I crept along the wall, keeping close to the remnants of the birthing-pods. I had to move quickly—now the karcist was lashing out with her limbs, with remarkable precision. Whenever they touched the forehead of one of the creatures, it would fall over as if stunned. But I had to be careful. If any of them were to strike me in their frenzy, certain death awaited.

I was almost to the door when I saw it on the ground before me: a crumpled sheet of dark fabric. The karcist’s cloak. Without thinking I grabbed it and dashed across the last stretch, towards the entrance behind her, and flung myself out into the dark.

The hallway was dim. I ran. Faint lights along the walls made them glisten redly. I did not stop to contemplate them, nor the echoes of distant chittering. 

In my youth I had laid eyes on the schematics for this place, when the messenger-Legate came to our temple. But it had been so long ago. If my memory followed—the interior passageways fed out into a main hall that encircled it all, and at each of the cardinal directions was a stairway up to the surface. One could recognize that passage for its size, and the curvature of its walls. All the ones encircled by it were a gridwork of straight lines. If I ran for long enough in one direction I should come to it eventually. 

If I wasn’t intercepted. 

I ran. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. The halls were strangely empty, but I had no time for suspicion. They passed in a blur. I was beginning to wonder whether I was going in circles, when I turned a corner and—

And stumbled out into a hallway wider than the others. The wall had a slight curve to it—I could not be sure at first, but as I ran through it became more obvious. It was somewhat brighter, and I ran in the direction from which the light seemed to grow stronger, until finally I came to an aperture opposite the wall from where I had emerged.

And above that, the light. 

A thimble’s worth of blue. The sky with its clouds. I could have wept. 

Instead I turned up the stairway and climbed.

***

As I ascended the steps, I gathered my wits enough to take the karcist’s ragged cloak and wrap it around myself, taking care to shroud my head as much as possible. I had been gripping it tightly as I ran, and now I wondered if the wrinkles would be noticeable. I was also quite different from her in stature. Anyone could tell from up close. My only hope was that their forces would be distracted by preparations for battle.

I took a final step… and was aboveground, blinking hard against the sun.

Kythera must have been a marvel. Even beneath the sprawling corruption, I almost see it before me—the towering buildings, sleek and elegant as they rose from the ground. I ducked into the shadow of one that was closest. The stairs seemed to have deposited me near one of the outer walls, but far enough that I would have to cross a few footpaths to get there. 

Of course, the structures were built closely together: it _was_ a fortress. But there was an undeniable loveliness in its design, the angles sharp and minimalist, that spoke of something greater. From the way that the streets stretched out before me, I could tell that they had been arrayed for efficiency. 

Only now, they were paved with flesh and bone. 

...But oddly empty. I could see only a few karcists shepherding their halkosts, and all of them were venturing in the same direction, away from me. Towards some point further along the outer wall. Were they preparing an invasion?

I glanced back at the fastest route to the wall from where I was—but even could I make it up there, it would be thousands of feet above land or water. More logical to see what I could learn, while I waited for the slightest chance of their landing.

So I followed, far enough behind the stragglers that I hoped they did not detect me. Until, in the distance, I could just begin to see… a crowd.

_No_ , I thought. _An army._

Larger than any I had seen, it seemed to radiate out from some point around a corner that I had not yet turned. Their forces were amassed, spilling out among the buildings close to that central point. But as far as I could see, they were facing the same direction. The outer wall. 

Suddenly, I remembered something from the schematic I had seen. That position. It was one of the gates. If they were amassing at the gates, it could only mean one thing.

And as I darted closer, I now heard the strains of a familiar voice.

The language was theirs. But it was the same voice as… _before_. It carried far more than it should. The work of thaumaturgy, surely.

I turned the corner.

There, standing atop the fortress gate, beyond the ranks of the army—was him. Far enough away that I could not make out the face, but it was certainly the same figure. 

He was flanked on both sides by the Klavigar. To his left, I could make out the slight figure from that first battle, wreathed in serpents. To his right, the Pale Hunter’s looming bulk. Then there were the two others that I had not yet seen—a tall, horned woman whose jewelry glittered in the sun; and a bandaged figure with many arms and many eyes. 

The sight almost distracted me from a certain word in his speech. I didn’t realize it was odd until he said it again. It was odd… because it wasn’t in their language. 

I recognized it. It was the name of an island. 

And I recognized the name of _this_ island in particular, because—

A chill came over me.

Then, two things happened at once. 

I felt the ground beneath me shift. I looked around. Slowly but surely, the fortress was tilting. A pressure began to build in my ears. 

I glanced back at the gate. Even from all the way atop it, the many-armed Klavigar was staring directly at me. I watched as he tilted his head towards the horned woman, as if speaking without opening his mouth. Then, he began to walk along the wall. 

_No_ , I thought. I ducked back into the shadow of the nearest building, and took off in the opposite direction from the one he had been walking in. I had to find a stairway. One where no one would be manning the wall. There must be fewer guards if they were about to mount an assault. And when I reached the top, then—

( _Please, please._ The litanies stuttered through my mind. _Fleet my feet, still my hands, steady my heart, sharpen my mind. That You shall be rebuilt. That You will be made whole._ )

I had fully broken away from the crowd now. Was scanning the bottom of the walls. 

There. Ahead of me were steps set into the wall, and I broke into a run as I saw them. When I reached them I began to scramble up. The walls were higher than I thought; as the fortress continued in its descent, several times I nearly slipped and fell, only to pull myself back and press myself to the stone. I could not catch my breath. 

Finally, I pulled myself to the top. And froze. 

Just a little ways off, near the length of twelve men laid flat, was the Klavigar. Their Tongueless Speaker. He did not walk with his legs, but with a multitude of longer arms that draped down from his upper body. And he was fast approaching. 

I lunged for the edge of the parapets, and looked over. 

Beyond lay the wine-dark sea. But in the distance I could see the island as well: its treetops, the bright shape of the temple near its shore. Could hear the cries of the seagulls. 

The fortress continued to dip lower. The fall would be substantial; perhaps the height of several trees. There were still gulls flying below. Closer, closer. If I misjudged the distance—

The brine-smelling breeze whipped hair into my face. I looked back. Six men now. He was almost here.

I grasped the edge of the parapets and heaved myself up.

Stood.

Closed my eyes.

_That You shall be rebuilt. That You will be made whole._

( _That is why we love them, after all._ )

Then, I let myself fall.


	5. Vector

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ascension, of a sort.

The seafoam was rosy as it gathered up around me. For a moment I could not tell if it was from the blood, or the setting sun. All the way from my eyes to the horizon the sea rippled out like a blade of dark glass. Above that, a wash of orange. So bright it pained to look at.

It was a different pain that had stirred me. 

I glanced down at my legs. A thought drifted across my mind, giddily. _Now we match._

But of course we didn’t, because he was dead, and I was not.

***

(As I plunged through the air, it had occurred to me that one of these Klavigar must be capable of warping space to pull my all-too-mortal form back over the ledge. I waited for the rush of vertigo as thaumaturgy closed around my innards and dragged me bodily upward—or simply pulled me into pieces, like that nameless body back in the dark. 

Only seconds from the water did I remember to reorient myself, so that my legs would land first.

Is it selfish, I wonder, to fear the pain inevitable? To mourn the form untenable?

I wish I had not been conscious of the impact.)

***

The siege was upon us. From within the underground complex, I winced when it felt the shockwaves. 

Once I had gathered the strength to turn my head—there had been the cliff, jutting out over the shore. Atop that, the temple. Through the haze of pain I scanned the skies for Kythera. Saw it hovering above the rooftops. They must have already landed, loosed their soldiers. 

But did they know where _that_ was kept? 

And if they did… would they know how to unlock it?

When the island fell (and it _would_ fall, I was beyond self-deception now, if someone struck him down this instant then still it would fall) we would finally be lost. Their forces could falter, their empire could crumble, their followers could scatter to the winds like so much chaff from the threshing. But they had done enough. 

We were lost, all of us. What I did now would be inconsequential. 

Except for this. 

Except that even now, with my shattered legs, I was dragging myself towards heresy. 

Useless beseechings played through my mind. _Please._ I willed my forearm to move; the ground had scraped it raw from wrist to elbow. _Please, answer me._ I pulled my legs along. 

_Answer me now and I will never ask of You again. I will never ask anything, I shall be Your vessel and Your paragon. I will be whatever You ask of me. My faith will be unshakeable, and I shall never think to doubt._

If I tilted my head I could just see the space that stretched up between the colonnades, where there was only darkness. 

_Is this what You intended?_

(I should have known better, of course. Better than to try and bargain. For was that not heresy in itself? What use was knowledge when it was simply handed to us?)

Little by little, I crawled between the columns, their shadows wavering in the weak light of the braziers. Crawled on towards the temple’s center. The floor beneath me grew tacky. The air stank of copper, sharp and unforgiving. Twice a tremor jostled me, the floor coming up hard against my face. 

If I simply laid down and died, at any time, it was likely to make no difference at all. 

And who was to say that what came next would not kill me? That the very essence of our Goddess would not reject this brazen upstart, his body still flesh, who had so gravely misread his utterly meaningless luck? Their forces would break down the door to find my body in a puddle of silver, or no body at all. And nothing would change.

Nikos, his face blank and bloodless, betraying nothing before the blast. It swam behind in the space behind my eyelids. If anyone deserved to be chosen, it would have been him. Before this war had made a madness of him. Before it made us both into a pair of simulacra, formless eidolons, one severed and the other—

_and the other—_

Gritting my teeth, I gripped the altar’s edge and pulled myself up. 

There was a hum in the air. In the subterranean silence I _felt_ more than heard it, a vibration that sank down all the way to the marrow. Something else was here: something far greater than this complex, greater even than the world beyond. That held all this in the palm of its hand. It prickled at my skin, the air’s electric heaviness. As though it would come alive at any moment. 

The amphora was bronze, not clay, but its shape was ordinary. No images were graven on its surface. Only my own reflection, distorted by the curve of it. 

There was a look in my eyes that I had never seen before, and for a moment I wondered whether this was me. For it felt as if I was watching someone else do all of this. Someone with wild eyes and shaking hands, blood-splattered, whose hair had come out of its tie. _Who are you?_ I wanted to ask, but the reflection would give no response. Its mouth was pressed into that same flatly puzzled line that had once troubled so many of our instructors. 

I squeezed my eyes shut. 

(I could not remember the last time I had wept. So I invented one.

I was small, I decided, and perhaps Karpathia had been there. _What use are those?_ she would have said. _Tears solve nothing._ She was going to call me back in; I was holding up the lesson. But then—if it was possible—she had given me one corner of her cloak to wipe my tears. _Better yourself, little doubter. To seek improvement is the only way to surpass this wretched world._ )

This was the death of all that I had ever known. I think I knew this even at our first march off to war; had heard it in Karpathia's voice and seen it in the baneful edge of Nikos’s smile. Perhaps it had been happening even before I was born. Perhaps it had been inscribed on the bones of some boy from a land to the far north, under the sun’s cold eye, just as the sum of our flaws had been inscribed on each of ours.

All I could do was pray that the final note in its dirge would ring on. That it would echo from this wounded place and sail away, burning in the shape of something too bright by fathoms for my body.

( _If I survived this—if even some small part of me remained in the aftermath—would I forget? Would I forget joy and sorrow, love and hate? Would I forget myself, to be as one with eternity in the design of the Broken One?_ And I could not tell if it was dread or hope that suffused me.)

Already I had profaned this place with my blood; left it in one long dark smear to dry on the ground behind, from entranceway to altar steps. Now I was going to reach out and touch the vessel, to stain it with my fingerprints. 

I was going to grasp it by the handles and lift it from the pedestal, willing my arms to keep steady instead of trembling like the fallible things that they were. 

And then, for the world outside these walls, which was just now beginning to end—

for the love of the dead—

for the sake of that last and lingering note—

I was going to drink.

***

_It burns._

_It burns, oh how it burns, and he forces it down until his fingers go numb with the effort of holding on, until the humming in his ears rises to a crescendo and bursts in a shower of bright sparks._

_The amphora clatters to the floor. His knees follow. The room tilts, the ceiling swings into view, and the colonnades are perfectly parallel as they stretch up into the dark._

_It pools in his center and radiates outward, like bronze into a mold. It takes his heart, his lungs, his liver. And still it takes. Without desire, without demand. Pressing up against the skin, white-hot, from behind his ribcage._

_It is a star’s heart, it is the surface of the sun, it is the sum of every pinprick-fine arm branching out from all the lightning that had ever split the skies. It is the core of the planet, iron and nickel. It is the answer to every question he has ever dared to ask._

_Billowing upward, pale as sunrise. Smoke from the eyes. Smoke from the mouth. Phosphorus in the veins._

_(choking now, collapsed on his side, eyes wide mouth wide scrabbling for the throat)_

_And it is_ him _. As the radiance courses through him and catalogs his insides, as it rearranges them atom by atom—_

_He knows the nothingness._

_A purity of nothingness. The nothingness that had stretched before time._

_No air. No sound. No darkness, nor the airless vacuum of space._

_The nothingness of utter nonexistence._

_Then, something._

_Heat and particles. Light without eyes to see. The void bursts into being around him, and as the particles pull others towards them they bond, and change. Like the foundations of a building he sees the patterns that underpin it all: strictures of force and movement, of mass and temperature, of the speed of light and the flow of currents. And still more particles, in greater numbers that spin themselves into larger and larger structures, pulverizing heights of heat and pressure—_

_—but obey all the same. For the same strictures tell them how to orbit and gravitate, and oversee the synthesis of every mineral on every sphere that wheels about in the dark, buried deep or caught in the currents of their endlessly churning seas. Laws that dictate the movement of a person’s arm when they raise it in greeting, or swing a hammer, or remove it to put metal in its place. For even flesh still lives and breathes and bleeds the dust of long-dead stars. And all life is bound by the forces that shaped their creation._

_Only humanity had been permitted to_ understand _. To know the workings of the world, and transcend them. To lift themselves from the flaws of their making, ever upwards, towards that same schematic on which reality had been built._

_It began with the simplest of methods, progressing towards greater and greater complexity. Whether stopping to look before pitching into a ravine, or felling a tree to bridge it, or building the most intricate device to circumvent it: the goal was the same. To realize the order of everything, until being and understanding melds into one and every part falls into place, all existence working in the seamless harmony of a well-oiled machine._

_Music splits the air. The pure note of a single bell, vast and distant._

_He sees—a shining city in the distance. Here the people are of one mind. They feel no sickness, nor chaos, nor confusion. Wage not the endless wars of animal instinct. And he sees that this is the world entire and many thousands beyond, strange ships bridging the vast stretches of void between them, so that he wonders whether this is even his Earth but none of it matters, because..._

_Because it is Broken._

_The shattering ripples through him. Like the scream of hinges on a long-closed door._

_Someone is laying him out, is pounding him into paper-thin sheets of metal, like hammer on anvil. Is taking shears to them, piece by piece. Inch by inch. Silvery flakes drift down like ash, slipping through his fingers. Like the loss of all he ever had-knew-was and all that was yet to be, washed away with the mercury bleeding from eyes that stare out blankly across the floor._

_Through the curtain of silvery fumes, he sees something glinting._

_(He wonders what it is.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand after five chapters, it's finally done: Bumaro's terrible magical-girl transformation.


	6. Torque

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For all things end, my friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [Ori_Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat) for looking over this chapter!

_On Gyaros, even the mice eat iron._

It was the first clear thought that I had. 

Out of the wreck of my senses I crawled, heaving myself up with that old saying on the surface of my mind. As if looking up from underwater to see that the waves had stilled and the skies had cleared—I reached out, grasped, clung to it.

Somewhere in the distance, I could almost hear gullsong. 

_The mice eat iron._ An odd little rumor that had begun to circulate among outsiders, or so the others had said, though its origins remained a mystery.

Even among our own, iron was rarer than bronze. Smelting it posed no barrier; our furnaces could provide the necessary temperatures. But not all ores could be supplied by our territories, so we were forced to involve ourselves in the wider trade in bronze. And we had rarely permitted visits from the uninitiated. What traders did arrive had little chance of seeing the temple’s interior. 

(There were stories, of course. Of those who had left and never returned. But they were scant, and we had not dwelt on them.)

My thoughts drifted to the wind-up mice that the other acolytes had once constructed. There were cats all over the islands, as early or earlier than there had been people, and although it was frowned upon, some of us had kept them.

_I created a device to read the histories to me. As a sort of code, anyway. A sequence of clicks. It’s quite the challenge to decipher._

Nikos was turning the lever that stuck from the back of the mouse. He placed it on the ground, and it sped off into the dark of our domicile.

_Did you know that we’ve skirmished with them, over the past centuries? Those flesh-worshipers?_

The cat followed, mechanical leg glinting briefly before it, too, vanished. We had found it missing that one, and he must have attached some kind of fabric to the paw, to dampen the sound.

_Now, I don’t mean to blaspheme. But it's a little like this, isn’t it?_

_Only I wonder who the cat is, and who the mouse._

Nikos. 

_Oh,_ I thought. _This is all wrong._

Then the cliffside came up to meet me, and I was dashed upon the rocks. 

***

What had awoken me was the absence of pain. 

I remembered… searing pain, slicing up through the mashed bones of my legs, and the dull throb of starvation squeezed tight around my innards. My entire being had felt like an accumulation of scrapes and bruises, acquired over the course of this war. 

Now, there was nothing. 

All at once I became aware that I was kneeling on the floor, my face downturned. This was in the manner of a sculptor’s model, as though I had been posed there deliberately. 

Between my hands was something cool, smooth, and cylindrical. I held it in the manner that someone might handle a flute or the stem of a flower. Delicate, precise, with little more than the tips of the fingers. 

My eyes opened.

The first thing I noticed was the length of metal protruding from my chest. I followed it until it came to the head of a hammer, which rested on the floor. There was no time to reflect on the uncanny sharpness of my vision, or the fact that I remained alive to see this. Because—

Directly beneath that, it was as though my skin had been replaced. 

Gleaming plates trailed down every part of the body that once had been mine, rippling like burnished bronze in the firelights. Lacking the bulk of armor, they conformed to all shapes, blending seamlessly. Silver threads trailed from a point beyond my vision. I reached up to touch my face and felt the clack of metal on metal. It was the same. 

A thought that was small and frail and mortal fluttered through my mind. _A death-mask_.

And suddenly I was aware of everything, down to the particle. The exact dimensions of this body, its position and composition, the mechanisms of workings that now thrummed within me. They filled my consciousness to the brim. The floor beneath me was cool where it met my knees—I had known that it was marble, but now every mineral throughout it sparked against my mind.

The carbonates were less useful, but there was magnesium and calcium, for removing impurities, and particles of iron oxide... I needed only to reach out and grasp it. And then it would turn. I saw the temple remade in metal, a masterwork of shifting parts that would rearrange themselves as needed. 

For the first time in months— _years?_ —there was a moment of perfect calm, as though a storm surge had rolled through me and swept away the debris. It was the cold light of _clarity_.

At that moment, I allowed myself to believe. Would it be so farfetched? That the Goddess in Her beneficence had drained all trace of feeling from me, freed me from the shackles of emotion? 

It should have been a wonderful gift.

And yet, a flicker of fear passed through me. 

The illusion was broken. The urge to choke, to spasm, to fall over on my side with the dissonance of my being—they ticked by like heartbeats. I felt them trickle through.

The sight of the handle lodged in my chest. The pain that should have manifested, yet did not. Was I moved? Or did I view it from a distance, detached and untouchable? 

With unnatural steadiness, a hand rose to grip the handle. It pulled.

The metal slid out, arcing sideways towards the floor until it landed with a clear, resounding ring.

***

Sometime in the ensuing centuries I came to this realization:

If my mind had been overwritten—if my very _self_ had been overwritten—

It would have been easier. 

I did not feel like myself, back then. But the jagged cadence of my thoughts revealed the truth. 

Even with the rhythmic coolness that had fallen over my consciousness, even if it glinted with the promise of untold stratagems—the person who rattled around in this divine form remained just as fallible. 

***

As for the denouement, I will not describe it in detail. No doubt others have already told the story. In whispers and metaphors and snatches of cradlesong, I have heard it from the mouths of old grandmothers in huts along the Neva, and from silversmiths in the Old Town of Prague… and now, more than ever, among our own congregation. They have told it in so many ways that one might think the whole of that time had curved and doubled back on itself and flowed outwards in a multitude of kaleidoscopic strands. 

And, as I said, I was not feeling quite myself.

What I will tell you is the most relevant portion, and how I remember it. 

We met on a field where the grass rippled like unrestful waves under a grey sky. His Klavigar were not with him.

He was small and human. I was an amalgam of gears and levers and sleek, strange munitions. 

Behind us, over the corpse-littered ground, ragged soldiers and damaged constructs dragged themselves through the last gasps of battle. By that point our forces had suffered heavy losses. And, despite initial appearances, so had theirs.

“It was supposed to be him.” 

With my mind occupied, I did not immediately grasp his meaning. I was calculating how best to make use of my new arsenal. He’d had centuries; I had not.

“All that enmity, and the raw talent to see it through.” He sighed. “Though perhaps this is for the better. I do not think that _you_ will ever become… monstrous.”

Then, it sank in. 

Buried to the hilt.

There had been no divine intervention. Only him. 

Perhaps the first few had been flukes, but every time thereafter that we had lived through some impossible encounter… I thought of the sonic device. It had all been deliberate. Steps in his plan. A plan that ended in the ascension of _someone_ , for which Nikos had been the candidate but I had become the final, unwitting proxy.

I spoke a single word. 

“Why?”

Why would he see one of us ascended, if—even at the cost of heresy—it would only give us a more powerful weapon?

“No answer I give will be satisfactory, so I will not attempt one.” He stared me in the eyes. “But because I can tell that you have never been given one—I will give you a choice, now. To turn away.” 

The staff towered over him, and its streamers of flesh snapped in the wind as he made a sweeping gesture. 

“Reject your fate. Bury yourself in some faraway place. Let this war come to its natural conclusion, whatever that may be. Doubtless my followers will thank you, until they do not. As for myself…”

He left that unfinished, glancing off somewhere to the side. In this guise, he looked as weary as any of the soldiers that still lingered on these fields. 

I tilted my head, waiting. 

“Or you can end this.”

(He was wrong, and I knew it as soon as he spoke the words. For this, there had never been, nor would ever be, a _choice_.)

I lifted the hammer. He gave a rueful smile.

“Come, then, child of bronze. End me. End this war. End our world.”

***

Afterwards, when I could, I picked myself up and hobbled away, choosing a random direction to walk in. 

There was pain again, but it didn’t matter. 

It was over, and I had finished it. Nothing felt quite real.

Eventually I came up to a cliff that overlooked the sea. The phrygana gave way to a few shrubs scattered throughout the grass, which itself faded into rock, very near the edge. Beyond that were the waves, crashing against the shore, and the shrieks of gulls that carried from far off. I knelt down on the rock. 

From the moment I’d awakened, and then throughout the battle, some part of me had been clinging to the hope that I could commune with Her. I’d listened for anything, the slightest hint of a message. But nothing had arrived. 

And if it had all been a mistake—not just a mistake, but the machinations of our foremost adversary on this earth—should I not try to atone? To return the Ichor?

Still, I did not think that I could damage this body. So I had wandered off, though I might have done any number of things just then. I might have returned, to help the survivors rebuild. But the wild lashings of Her power had scorched that battlefield to a cinder, and I still recalled how easily—how _imperfectly_ —their flesh could be remade. By my own hand. 

So I knelt myself down to pray. 

***

There was a tinkling sound. _Like bells_ , I thought. I looked up.

Then, it rose above the tides.

More music than word, a purity of meaning—the directive rang through my mind. To ensure the occurrence of certain events, distant and scattered in the currents of time yet to come, which were to bring about our true rebuilding. 

A single chord. But what were chords, but a harmony of notes? Scores of unaccountable variables, for which I would have to wait, and wait.

Still, it was a purpose. All I had ever wanted.

It was not enough. 

(I think that even then I could sense it. Even if I were to live until our cities sank into the sand, until I forswore my name and forgot my own face—I would never have that answer. I was never to know, with absolute certainty, if any of this had been ordained... or whether it had all been the work of one man, who none had ever guessed would tire of living.)

I bent my head—to weep, I suppose—but remembered that I could not. And that while I could have laughed, I _would_ not. 

So I picked myself up, for the last time, and set off to carry it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally done! 
> 
> First, I should credit something that I couldn't earlier, for fear of spoilers. In the very early stages of writing this, I came across a [certain comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCP/comments/etsx7k/grand_karcist_ion_klavigar_saarn_sarkic/ffli122/) by A_Blessed_Feline on Reddit. To paraphrase, their headcanon is that part of Ion was always aware of what the Archons were doing to him, and this part of him started the war with the Mekhanites, knowing that they were the only ones with weapons capable of defeating him. That influenced Ion's "Thanatos Gambit" in this, although the exact degree to which "Bumaro"'s plot armor is a result of luck/divine intervention/Ion's meddling is still up to interpretation.
> 
> The "mice eating iron" bit is from _On Marvellous Things Heard_ , a treatise that was attributed to Aristotle but was probably written by a Pseudo-Aristotle. It's quite a ways past the time period, but I included it as a preexisting rumor because I liked the imagery.
> 
> Finally, thanks to everyone who read this. I couldn't have managed it if it wasn't for you!


End file.
